Looking back into the farthest reaches of my mind with, at this point, extreme precision, as opposed to the usually lacklustre and muddled way I deal with my brain, I could not fathom who the man in front of me was, standing there, first requesting me to recognize him, and then finally commanding me to do it, and I, after having failed to comply with the request, was beginning to fail to follow the command as well, and it’s not that I feared for my life, but that this man was, how to put it, huge, and even though he wasn’t looking at me in a menacing manner, I could see the menace he could cause in a second if he wanted to, he was one of those men who are weapons in themselves, big, strong, nimble, I knew he could beat the shit out of me no problem, so I very much wanted to follow the command and fucking recognized him, but lo and behold, I just couldn’t, no matter how much I searched in the blackened alleyways of my brain, and searching I was, with the biggest flashlight I had ever used in there, I was working at cut-throat efficiency, with razor blade precision, to no avail of course, I was at such a pass that it was beginning to dawn on me that this was just a gimmick the guy pulled before beating the shit out of his victim, he goes to a stranger, says recognize me or I beat you, and when the stranger obviously doesn’t recognize him, he beats the shit out of that stranger, as a strategy, this method has a few advantages, for instance, you never beat up anyone you know so you have to travel further and further to newer and newer territory, and if you keep behaving this way, you will just have to keep running and running, as a life that’s pretty neat, one of the most adventurous ways of life I can think of, but as much as I recognized and appreciated his strategy, I didn’t appreciate one bit that I was just about to get beaten up, and he just kept looking at me and looking at me, never for one instance taking his eyes off me, and so patiently too, as if he wanted me to give up actively, he just stood there like he wouldn’t make a move till I did, and I sat there without saying anything because I didn’t know what to say, one wrong word and I could be getting beaten to shit, I had to be very bloody careful, I recognized at least that much, he was gracious enough to give me as much time as I needed but that also put me in a peculiar position, of having to make the first move, to do which I at the very least had to understand the kind of game that I was playing, as I sank lower and lower into myself, an answer finally emerged and I said to him, ‘you don’t have to beat me up, I will go home, put on make-up and tell people you beat the shit out of me when I couldn’t recognize you, you can  give me a photograph of yours, I will show it to everyoneso you can never be seen in these parts again, and don’t worry, I will tell them I snatched your wallet while you were beating the shit out of me, the photograph fell out while you were taking it back from me, and that I hid it,  et cetera, et cetera, you get the point though right, you don’t have to beat me up.’ Immediately I knew I had uttered the wrong fucking words, I always utter the wrong fucking words, I have always uttered the wrong fucking words, and I knew I was in trouble yet again, as if all the beatings I had received for speaking the wrong words hadn’t been enough already, one more to come, I thought, because the way he looked at me, as if he was perplexed, as if he didn’t know what I was talking about, he clearly didn’t want me referring to the secret that I already knew, maybe this was the first time someone had cracked his code and he was taken aback, I thought, and then he upped the game further, as if what he had been doing wasn’t enough already, he took my name, ‘you have to recognize me Akshat’ is what he said, commanding me once more to recognize him, as if I didn’t already know that there was no way for me to recognize him, quite simply because I had never seen him before, I couldn’t have ever seen him before, he clearly wasn’t even from these parts, he was from way further north, you could easily tell by his features, really large men up in the north, when they come to these parts, they cause havoc, that’s why we don’t allow them to legally come here, but the bastards know of many other ways of entering the country, and it really doesn’t take much to be honest, some 50 bucks for the border crossing, another 200-300 for all the documents, this one didn’t seem like he had greased his way through, this one was a thoroughbred criminal, and their kind don’t pay money to government officials for tasks they can accomplish themselves, this one walked his way through one of the many routes that only his tribe know, these people are born with the map of their surroundings, wherever they may live, and then here he was, in my face, intruding on my property and my person, practically threatening to kill me if I didn’t do something for him that was quite literally impossible for me to do. But how does he know my name, I wondered to myself all of a sudden, I hadn’t registered that earlier, and as soon as I registered this fact, I realized how faulty my thinking about this entire case had been, this man was much better researched than an ordinary criminal, an ordinary criminal wouldn’t know my name, this man knew my name, no ordinary criminal sits and does research, only professionals do that, it finally dawned on me who he really was, I couldn’t believe how utterly wrong I had been all this while, my thinking about the entire case had been marred by my innate hopefulness, for the situation in actuality was much worse than I had imagined it, this man hadn’t just arbitrarily chosen me as a target for his gimmick, this man had been sent to kill me, everyone knows the government hires assassins from the north to do its dirty work here when it can’t trust a native to do the job, everyone also knows that these assassins charge a hefty sum and that they never fail, not a single failure has been recorded, I knew then that I was doomed, this man was just playing a game with me before eliminating me, he was probably running a private experiment of some sorts, these assassins the government hired were scientific men, educated and trained in various fields, assassination for them was more an art-form than anything else, every year their national government awarded a prize to the best assassination, so these guys came up with newer and craftier ways, I was thinking about all this as he stared and stared at me, as if telling me I had all the time in the world to think about what he was doing to me, but that all that time would in the end prove useless because of the impossibility that constituted his demand, ‘I will just walk away, I will never be seen again I promise, no one in these parts or any parts of the world will see me, I have a basement, it’s true, my father built it, he doesn’t know that I know but I know, it’s in the mansion no one uses anymore so there is no chance they will look for me there, my father is anyway half senile and won’t remember to check there, the basement has supplies for 20 men to last 50 years, I don’t know what math they did to store exactly those supplies, maybe my father just liked those numbers, anyway, the point being, I can vanish, you can say you got rid of me, I am sure even they aren’t barbaric enough to make you produce some organ of mine, or god forbid, my head, though even that could be arranged I am sure, you see what I am getting at, are you at all comprehending what I am saying to you, I will give you all the money you want, you will have one less man’s murder on your conscience, I said all that but he just looked more and more despondent, dismayed almost, as if I was committing sacrilege by discussing this plan openly, he shook his head as if my naiveté in offering him a deal saddened him, as if I was doing him dishonour by thinking of him as corruptible, while he tried to convey to me, not by speech as much as by his bodily gestures, that he was completely incorruptible, once given a contract he had to carry it out, he was trying to tell me that I might give him money right now but the government was his more regular and most reliable contractor, he depended on his livelihood on the government, and thus, naturally, he could not shit in the same plate in which he was eating, to speak colloquially, I understood all that, I understood that my fate was sealed, but I couldn’t just give up, there was something in me that still wanted to live, lying down in this hospital for the last one month I had thought of nothing more than my intense will to live, I had fought back into life after an almost fatal accident by my sheer willpower, and as I was reaching the summit of my recovery, here he was, my nemesis, come to kill me. By a stroke of luck as yet unparalleled in my conscious life, the doctor entered the room with a retinue of his cretins, except one who was cute, she wore just the kind of glasses I liked, spoke in a sweet understated manner and most importantly, she always genuinely smiled at me and wasn’t disgusted when I smiled back at her, unlike all the others whose faces seemed to have become disfigured into permanent scowls, these cretins fawned over the doctor hoping to win for themselves the best recommendations or some such thing, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to fawn over somebody for recommendations, but to each his own, they entered like they usually did, making a loud noise, in complete disregard for the mental peace of patients unfortunate enough to be interred in their godforsaken disgrace of a hospital, for the first time I was thankful to see the lot, but even then after about five seconds of them caw-cawing in my room, I thought that maybe I would be better off dying after all, but I beat those defeatist thoughts out of myself and decided to be proactive about saving my life from the assassin, ‘doctor, stay here, with all of them, and call the police, this guy is an assassin, but he can’t kill us all, that would call too much attention,’ I shouted at them but I could see my words were not making the kind of impression I had hoped for, instead of breaking into frantic activity after learning of the presence of an assassin in the same room as them, they just looked crestfallen and morbid, with expressions on their faces as motionless and vapid as before, only the cute girl smiled at me, but that confused me even more, what the hell was there to smile at after all, we were in a serious situation where I could get killed and these automatons were just standing there as if nothing was happening, as if not a dent had been made in their boring lives, the worst of it wasn’t that they didn’t understand me, but that they suddenly acquired their pity faces, some of them even shook their heads, the doctor started comforting the assassin, rubbing his shoulders, in a vaguely sexual way, and then the doctor escorted the assassin out of the room and the retinue of cretins followed finally leaving me alone in peace. Even though I was utterly confused, I was also utterly relieved by the threat having passed me by, and I was too tired after the strenuous nervous tension to focus on the events in order to examine them with full clarity and extract from them their logical conclusions and consequences, I put the examination off and decided to take a much needed nap to refresh myself, I also hoped that my dreams would throw further light on the events that had caused such a strain on my nerves, thinking that maybe some new way of looking at the events would open up in my dreams which I could utilize in my examination of what the events signified in the larger scheme of things and where my life stood vis-a-vis the changed configuration of the universe, I went to sleep.